¶ Intro / Opening
Hey, everybody, just want to give a quick tour update
¶ The Dawn of Timekeeping: Sun and Shadows
because we have three shows coming up very very soon with plenty of great seats available.
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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just hanging out and we decided, Hey, do some talking about time keeping, so that's what we're doing today.
Yeah. Olivia helped us put this one together. I think the charge was, Hey, how about something on the history of time keeping? Mm hm without getting two in the weeds about how all of these things work, because that's a whole other thing, like if you want to really break down clocks and watches. But I think she did it just right. The Goldilock zone, as they say.
Oh nice, nice astronomical cosmological reference there.
Well, I think that is a reference for a lot of things, right, Nope, that Okay.
Where'd you get this idea? Because this was when you came up with.
You know, man, I don't know. I think I was maybe thinking about a watch on my wrist and then wondering or no, maybe I saw someone had a what do you call those things that call it hourglass, and I was wondering about just hourglasses, and then I started thinking about like just you know, the concept of time and when people started keeping time, and I was kind of had a hunch and I was right that, you know, the need to keep time didn't come around til much later.
So like as we'll see, early timekeeping was more like seasonal or astrological, and it didn't get to be a thing like hey, I have an appointment at a certain minute until much much later.
Yeah, but earlier than you'd think, or earlier than I thought.
At least yeah, agreed.
So speaking of timekeeping, you really can kind of say the whole thing just started out with the sun. And one of the neat things about life on Earth is that you can cast a shadow. Most things cast a shadow, with the exception of maybe like amba or something like that. But if you put like a stick in the ground, it's going to cast shadows that move throughout the day. And if you really pay attention to this kind of stuff, you can actually use it to track time throughout the day.
And that is almost certainly the earliest way that humans track time. And the stick they put in the ground is widely known as anomon g nom n. I think it means rod in Greek. Maybe I also saw that it was slang in Greek for penis. No really, yeah, and that just.
Just just like, hey, to check out the gnomon on that guy.
Yeah, almost exactly. If not that, but just said an ancient Greek Oh okay, got cha hellenic. Yeah, but just tracking the shadow that the gnomon cast, hopefully just a stick in the ground. Yeah, that's that was early timekeeping.
Oh man, I have a thousand jokes. I'm just gonna walk right past at this point.
Good for you. Buddy, you're a pro.
I know growing up here it's fifty four. So that was, yeah, that's what people use for the longest time, and that eventually, as we'll see, would carry over to things like sundials. But it's no surprise that China was way ahead of the game as far as timekeeping goes, because the oldest surviving sort of actual thing that we have comes from northern China, from an archaeological site that they found dated back to twenty three hundred BC. And again, as you'll see,
this is a recurring theme. Like I mentioned, it wasn't necessarily like hey, we got to keep the time from day to day. It's more like, let's calculate the seasons or you know, the things happening up in the sky.
Right, because it was snowing in the middle of China and somebody said what season is it, and somebody else said, let's find out what this nomon And the other person's like, no, don't pull that out, and they're like no, I mean the stick.
Right, They said, you can get canceled for that, right.
So if you're like, well that sounds a lot like a sun dial, you're right. The thing that sticks up for the sun dial is a no mon. There's another version of it that's even earlier than the sun dial, it seems from ancient Egypt, called the shadow clock. Yeah, it's actually really hard to describe. It's much easier to just go look up. But imagine a capital t laying flat on its back on the ground and it's raised its head and neck up to look at its feet.
That's essentially that's kind of perfect. Actually, thank you.
I really thought about that one for a while. I
¶ Sundial Evolution and Seasonal Hours
have to admit. But the shadow that that crossbar the top of the tea casts on the rest of the tea over the day is demarcated, so you can track six hours a day as the sun is rising in the east, and then you turn it around at noon and then you track the next six hours of the sun is setting in the west. Pretty spectacular considering that's close to three thousand years old.
Yeah, for sure for that descriptor to help you that you were laying flat on your back with your neck raised up looking at your feet.
Yeah, sadly, I have to admit that I had to go lay down and figure it out myself. Okay, that's good, but yes I was.
Yeah, nice work. Finally to the sun dial. The first round sun dial that we kind of know as a sun dial seems like it was created by a Greek philosopher name annex Mander, very cool name, not Alexander, but Annexmander of Malaitis. This was sixth century BC, but again probably still tracking seasons at this point. The first sun dials out of Greece that actually marked hours, like when people started keeping track of the hourly time, and as we'll see it, you know, it just gets more specific
until be eventually much later we'll get to minutes. But the hourly timekeeping started in three point fifty BCE.
Yeah, and then very quickly after that, around two to eighty BCE, they came up with the Hemi cycle, which is imagine like a cube block of stone with a basin a bowl carved out of the middle, and then they managed to cut it perfectly in half so that you just have half of a bowl. That's a Hemi cycle, Because it turns out all you need is half a
ball to make a sun dial like that. And I really do wonder if somebody built them like that, like they'd make the one, split it in two and then all of a sudden they had two hemicycles to sell.
I bet you're getting really good at describing things at this juncture in your career.
It took me long enough for almost two year eighteen. It is. It's dismaying to try to explain something and just make it even more confusing than it was initially. I finally got dismayed enough that I decided to do something about it. And what I did was lay down naked and think it over.
By the way, quick correction because a listener just wrote in about this, we're about to be at your nineteen and completed your eighteen technically no really, yeah, because you're nineteen and you're twenty are the are you know the two next years? Does that make sense?
It does, But I feel like it's wrong because started in April two thousand and eight and going to April of twenty twenty six, eighteen years completed. I see, yeah, I should have known right when somebody busted out mathis it's just been like, yeah, that's right.
The cool thing about the Hemi cycle, besides the fact that people back then probably said, is that thing a hemi when they walked by, you know, it couldn't resist that one. But they knew at that point it was a pretty smart thing that the sun's position changes over the course of the year, over the course of those seasons, obviously shorter winter hours, which we're going to get to,
but they accounted for that. They had sun dials that would show the time using multiple arcs carved into the hemisphere to account for that sun changing over the course of the year.
Yeah, So like the lines of the hours went up like longitude, and then the seasons were like latitude, and I guess just depending on how high up or how shallow the shadows where you could tell what season it was because it was within one of those arcs, or two of those arcs, or three or four.
Right, Yeah, and you know I mentioned the seasonal hours when Greek sun dials started dividing daytime into twelve equal parts. Obviously not hours, because we eventually ended up at twenty four like not hours as we know it. But they would depend on the length of the season, so it's not like they accounted for it so they were all uniform. It was just like, hey, sometimes during the year, what
¶ Portable Sundials and Societal Needs
they will one day call an hour is longer than others, which would lead to some kind of a cool thing where ancient texts in Greece would refer to that like a winter hour is something that could be done in a shorter amount of time, Like that'll just take you a winter hour.
Yeah, And so this was the ancient Greeks. This lasted well into the medieval period. That's how people did hours. The hour was longer in the summer, the hour was shorter in the winter, and it was essentially their way of what we do for daylight savings time by adjusting.
Yeah, except where just you know, modern humans are way too anal to just let it kind of flow like that still got to be exact, you.
Know, right, right, Okay, so you got the sun dial, and everybody was like, well, we move around a lot and not every place has a sun dial, but I always want to know what time it is. And what humans do is take a technology and figure out how to shrink it down into a portable size. And they did that with sun dials too, usually made of bronze, and because they were mobile, they would also have settings and often instructions on how to adjust it depending on
where you were in the world. Like some of the ancient ones that have been found have like just put it to this setting if you're in Constantinople, or put it in this setting if you're in Luxer, right, and then other ones you kind of have to figure it out a little more based on latitude. But they were portable and essentially they were like pocket watches but amazing bronze spheres sometimes.
Yeah, So, like once they could do that, they would hang it facing the sun so that that little pointer I guess it was still called a gnomon at this point, I.
Would think so. I think some people still call them gnomons when they're referring to sun dials.
Yeah, I think you're right. But they would face the sun so that that pointer's shadow would hit the correct hour. Later on, they had different types that had like a pinhole that let the beam of sunlight come through and actually shine a mark on the hour, which was like super advanced at the time.
Yeah, it was like the staff of raw model.
Oh yeah.
So there was a big reason that people were keeping track of the hours in ancient Rome, especially by the time Rome came around. It wasn't necessarily to keep appointments, although they certainly had that kind of thing, or to keep time on stuff. One of the big things over the years in different cultures, it turns out, was they needed to time things, especially for something like drawing water.
Like water was a communal resource and everyone had a certain allotment, and they would divvy up those allotments not by measuring how much water was taken out, but as much water as you can within this you know, before this beam of sunlight reaches this little line essentially, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, But in Rome they had an extra reason for it, and that was because the hours of every single day, or the first twelve hours of every single day, because it wasn't initially that they were also like, let's track the nighttime too. They just tracked from sunrise to sunset typically. Yeah, each of those hours was associated with the different astrological sign. It was called planetary hours, and it was because so
you could maximize whoever you were worshiping. So like if you were worshiping Seline the moon goddess, you wanted to do that three hours after sunrise on Monday, and so you would use some sort of time keeping device to keep track of that.
Yeah, And the same, of course is true in Islam. Once that became a big thing, the Muslims adopted sun dials because they're you know, have to pray and at different increments at different times, so it was really to kind of keep up with their prayer hours. And they are the ones who came up with, like, if you have a sun dial in your garden, it's a little thing, which we have one of those, about one for Emily a few years ago. Cute. That kind of sun dial
is what the Muslims came up with. The one that's got the flat circular base, and that nomon is am I saying that right, Yeah, the nomon is parallel to the polar axis of the planet Earth.
Yeah. They also laid trigonometry on the whole thing and came up with a bunch of different kinds of sun dials. There's one that was conical, and remember the Hemi cycle. Imagine taking that and just kind of squishing the bowl and adjusting it at an angle. That's what a conical sun dial is. They look amazingly cool, So I say, look one of those up.
And then finally I think before we break, we should give a shout out to early thirteenth century Moroccan mathematician Abou al Hasan al Marakushi, because this is the dude that was finally like, you know what uniform hours is
¶ Water, Incense, and Candle Clocks
where it's at, and we should start kind of keeping track of this stuff in a uniform way, like actual real timekeeping, and that kind of spread out all over the world from there.
Very nice. Yeah, all right, well let's take that break. Then it's time.
All right, we'll be right back up with Joe shoe on Chow.
Stop you shit, okay, Chuck.
So we're back, and before we move on, I want to say that I finally got it. Reggie Watts.
Did you listen to it?
Yeah, when I was qaing and I got it, and I was like, man, that zuumed right past me.
Well you were in a thought and I slipped it in there very stealthily.
It was very great. All right, nice little treat for we're talking about the National Radio Quiet Zone episode. By the way, everybody, that's right, so you got sun dials. Next thing that we moved on to is water. A bunch of different cultures came up with water clocks. It's not clear if again it started in China and moved to Greece and then moved to the Muslim countries. Who knows, But it's also possible that this that people came up
with us. There were just so many things available to you to use to try to keep track of time, and there were really simple water clocks. Water was eventually used to run mechanical clocks, but the first ones essentially were like almost our glasses made of water.
Yeah, I mean, essentially, what you're doing is you're either keeping track of time by water draining out of something that's marked by increments, or filling something up that's marked by increments.
Right, yeah, pretty much. I mean that's essentially it. And you could supplement sun dials with these, because on a sun dial, if it was really overcast, yeah, you had no idea what time it was at night. These things worked as well, though really there were two problems with them. One was that they would freeze. If it was freezing water,
clock probably wouldn't work quite as well. And then also the viscosity of water can change depending on variables like temperature and stuff like that, so they weren't entirely accurate or reliable all the time. But they did the trick for enough time that people started to improve on them and add different kind of engineering principles like floats and valves and siphons to regulate water more accurately.
Yeah, I wonder if there was ever like, sorry, I'm late, you know, we had a cold snap. My water clock froze, Like you got to move those things inside, buddy.
I guarantee somebody use that excuse.
Yeah, for sure. But because of the issues with water and temperature and stuff like that, mercury became a pretty reliable substitute. This was in tenth century CE, and it was a Chinese engineer who figured this out, and that basically, you know, solved a lot of the problems because mercury wouldn't freeze, it wouldn't have different viscosities at different temperatures, and it would ensure that you're on time to that appointment.
Yeah, and that engineer was Jiang si Jun.
Nay show off. I was just gonna walk right past that.
Here's my favorite kind of early Oh me too, is it? Yeah? I surprised. Yeah, incense clocks.
Yeah, and I'm not even into incense anymore. I was in college. I think, like most people.
Are same here. I used to burn some frank incense man.
Yeah, me too, But I really love this one. This existed in China at least since the sixth century CE. Also in other parts of Asia and Korea and Japan for sure. But it's I love the idea because essentially it's it's almost like a fuse, and as we'll see it sometimes was a literal fuse, but incense was burned and used as a timer, like how quickly does that thing burn down and stop burning?
Yeah. The coolest ones though, were incense clocks that were like a box and it was essentially like an intricate maze that you would pack with incense and then light it. And there were different I guess stencils that you'd put on top of the box to create different times. So like if you wanted an hour, that was a very simple maze. If you wanted the whole night, it was a much more intricate maze. And that's another thing I
would say to look up. There's a lot of stuff you should go and look up throughout this episode, and incense clocks are definitely one of them.
Yeah, but I'm glad you saved this one for me because I think it's the coolest part about all of the incense clock stuff is that they had different sense and it just makes sense over the course of a night where you could smell the time, so you knew when a certain smell came up what time it was, which I think is super like ingenious and its simplicity, and also like, you know, you know what happens at sandal with time, sexiest time.
Yeah, I've got jokes that I'm keeping it myself.
Yeah good.
There are also alarm clocks. You could use the heat from an incense stick I guess or whatever to basically burn through a thread and drop a bunch of like bells or something into a metal dish. That'll wake you up for sure every time. And apparently Chinese messengers would take incense and light one end and put the other in between their toes and wake themselves up like that, which is man, just drink a bunch of water. That's all you need to do. Don't burn your toes.
Yeah that's true, but like I said, that's like literally lighting a fuse and it like, you know, you get the hot foot and you know it's time to get up and deliver the mail or whatever.
That's right.
We also have candle clocks that came along. This is the medieval era. Notably, Alfred the Great supposedly would get his day together and time it by six candles. Each would burn for about four hours, so six times four twenty four.
Yeah. You could also take say a four hour candle and break it, like just mark equal lines across it and basically track of time like that too. Then there's astrolabes. I'm not even gonna try to really describe an astrolab Yeah, go.
Look those up.
They are incredibly intricate mechanically. They were invented by Muslims in I think the sixth century CE, so it's just amazing that they were able to do this. And astrolabes were used at c until the sexton came along about a thousand years later. Essentially, that's how effective they were. But you could navigate with them, you could survey with them.
You could also keep time with them because you just adjust the astrolabe to mimic the stars or something like that, and you can be like, oh, it's two thirty, it's Sandalwood time.
That's right, it's Sandalwood time. Then we finally get to the hour glass. Yes, but later than you think, and especially and I'm glad Livia dug Deep because she's a great researcher. But if you just sort of do cursory Internet research. You might find a lot of people saying it's ancient Egypt, but that's probably not the case. It's actually much later than that, probably the late medieval period that hourglasses came along, and actually after the mechanical clock
that's nuts. The earliest known reference is in Italy in
¶ Elaborate Mechanical Timepieces
thirteen thirty eight. And you think an hourglass is pretty easy to make, like, you know, you just blow the glass in a certain way and throw the sand in there. But sanda spinicky as you know, as far as humidity and moisture goes, So you had to get the sand in there, you had to seal it up, but you couldn't seal it up with any kind of moisture because it would clump up. So it's a little trickier to make an hourglass than you might imagine.
Yeah, when it's humid out, the soap opera Days of Our Lives never get started, right, It's sad.
Was that the one you watched in college?
I think that's what people wrote in and said, yeah, I'm.
Pretty sure I couldn't remember.
So one of the other things humans do when they have an invention that's popular and widespread, they don't just shrink it down to a miniature portable size. They also just show off they do whatever they can to make it even cooler. And there were a succession of inventors in different parts of the world over the years that did some really neat stuff with say like water clocks. One was a guy named Andre Nkos. He was from Macedonia and he built what's called the Tower of Winds
in Athens. It's this I think hexagon or octagon made of marble that's fifteen meters or about forty five feet tall, still standing, but when it was in use, it had water clocks that had sundials, you could gauge the wind, you could tell what was going on celestially. He just basically packed every Niedo timekeeping invention that was around at the time end of this thing.
Yeah, and like you said, a lot of people just started getting just sort of fancy with it and actually just really creative. In eighth century CE, there was a Chinese Buddhist monk who along with his colleagues, created a clock that was a water powered wheel had a gear system. This is when gears really started becoming a huge thing in time keeping. Yeah, and it did a single rotation every twenty four hours, which you think, like, all right,
that just sounds sort of regular. But it also had like bells chiming on the hour, and I had a drumbeat that chimed every quarter hour. So this is when like kind of hearing chimes and things to tell you what time it was came in.
It went but in every fifteen that's right. There's a guy named Sousung who is very famous for his thirty five foot I also saw it described as forty foot clock tower. One of the things it did were there were mannequins that came out and rang gongs. Yeah, like you usually associate this with like maybe some sort of cuckoo clock or something like that. This is from the eleventh century, so it's pretty impressive that he came up with this. And again it was a water clock, like
this is running on water. And then someone else who put water clocks to great use was a just this amazing inventor and engineer. His name was Ismael al Jazari. He was from Upper Mestamia, and his whole thing was not just accurate clock timekeeping, but just essentially delightful little add ons that did some cool stuff. He created what's called the castle clock. That's pretty neat, but for my money,
look up the elephant clock. There's a life size replica of it at a museum I think in Saudi Arabia, and you can see, you know, how it works and what it does. But essentially, water just moves from part to part. There's a scribe in the middle riding on the elephant. There's another person on the front of the elephant driving it. There's another guy way up there play symbols and stuff. It's just amazing, especially when you learn
¶ The Birth of Mechanical Clocks
about how every single step works.
Yeah that thing you sent that to me, that was super cool looking. Yeah, very ornate. Now we kind of get to the point, shall we break her? Can we keep going?
Yeah, let's take a break, all right.
We'll be right back up with Joe shoe on cho.
Stuff is shit.
All right, So we're back to wrap it up on clocks and eventually spoiler watches. But we're at the point now where clocks kind of start ticking and we're getting closer and closer to keeping track of seconds, although that'll be a second till we get to it. But as for mechanical clocks, go those water powered Chinese clocks arguably
were their first mechanical clocks. And again it's one of those things where they don't know if people invented these in Europe or their Muslim world at the same time, or if it kind of spread out from one place to another. Another origin story is maybe mechanical clocks came from Europe with it. Would it be Gerbert? I think so, Gerbert of Arlac, who was a French scholar, but you might know him a little better as Pope Sylvester the Second. Oh, okay,
because he would become pope later on. He developed I guess in his pre pope days a mechanical type timekeeping device, like truly mechanical in nine ninety six CE. But then it took a few hundred years for it to become like for mechanical clocks to become a real thing. It didn't really catch on, right.
Which makes some people suspect that that he might not have actually done that. Yeah, so what's happened here? I guess we've transitioned from tracking the movement of water to track time to actually using the kinetic energy in water that's say, flowing downhill, to run gears and stuff like that. Those are the mechanical time devices that were some of the original mechanical It's like the Chinese came up with
this a very long time ago. When Europe got involved, they removed water to run gears and replace them with weights. But it's the same principle at work. Like if you hold a weight up on a rope and let it fall down, gravity's gonna pull it toward the Earth and it's releasing kinetic energy. If you can control its descent, you can use that to turn gears into keep track
of time in a very specific way. I mean, it's not nearly as accurate as anything we tracked time with today, but it was still pretty impressive that they were making these in like the thirteenth century.
Yeah, for sure. There was a monk in twelve seventy one named Robertus Anglicus who he talked about there was actually a Latin term horologia, which is the Latin term for time measuring device, and they were using weights to turn wheels like exactly one time over the course of one day. And again they would get kind of break that down and get more specific as they learn more
about gears and how the weights work. But you know, the weights if you look at a grandfather clock or a cuckoo clock, like these things all have and we'll get to the pendulums. Not only pendulums and a grandfather clock, but it's weights that are still operating this thing.
Yeah, and one of the inventions that really kind of it was a game changer. It's called the virgin foliot mechanism. Essentially, you remember in Karate Kid two where all of those okay now and villagers are sitting there playing their hand drums. Yeah, yeah, okay, So that's essentially a virgin of foliot kind of imagine the drum part is the I think foliot, and the verge is the handle and when there's like a crown wheel,
the gear the main gear that operates a clock. When it turns, it turns the folliot, and the folliot turns like slowly one way and then slowly back another and when it moves back in position, the gear is allowed to turn. So you're actually controlling the kinetic energy of those weights that's falling and making the whole thing move, and by doing that in a precise way, that's how you can keep track of time.
Yeah, and you know it stays constant because that thing is constantly stopping and starting, so it's going to keep that weight from picking up momentum as it goes down and descends. So that's how you get the constant speed. And that's also how you can create a ticking sound. It's just that little, you know, constant intermittent movement.
Yeah. And the but you wouldn't it doesn't move like an Oknawan hand drum moves. I mean, it moves not as fast, I should say, be out of control clock.
Yeah. Didn't that drum move faster faster the more intense that the scenes got in that movie?
Hmm, yeah, oh yeah, Man, it really helped build the suspense I think during the main fight maybe.
Yeah. I mean, this is a pretty smart device for a movie.
It was a good sequel as far as sequels go. They didn't just you know, build on the last one. They really kind of went all out and recreating things.
Yeah. And one of the great bad movies of all time. And I'm lobbying to get on a friend of the show The Flophouse, the best bad movie podcast out there in my opinion, to do Karate Kid three, which is hugely entertaining as a bad movie.
Is that even worse than Jaden Smith's Karate Kid, because I heard that was pretty bad.
I didn't see it. But Karate Kid three, oh man, if you're into a fun bad movie to watch with people, Karate Kid three is one. And that was one where I thought I talked about on the show at some point, but where God, Ruby was probably like six years old and came up with, like, legit, her first quality joke watching that movie.
Can you share it?
Uh?
I don't know if it would translate. I'll tell you later.
Okay, that's fine, Yeah, but good for her. Six is a good age to come up with a quality joke by.
Actually, I think I could. Actually there's a recurring thing in that movie that happens where every time the bad guys come into a place, they turn a light off, like they'll come into a warehouse to fight, and they turn the light off. It happened like two or three times, and I kept going like, what is going on? It's
so weird. And then later in the movie they they rush out and find Daniel Son and Miagi in a forest, and Ruby said, that'd be funny if they reached over to a tree and turned the moon off.
¶ Clocks in Society: Medieval to Modern
That's good. That is a quality joke.
That's a pretty good joke.
Yep. Yeah, yeah, I haven't seen the karate Kid three. I know of it. I know Hillary Swank's the karate kid in that one.
No, no, no, no, no. Uh, well, maybe I'm getting the number wrong. Karate Kid three was actually Daniel and Miagi still, Oh was it? Yeah? Unless I have it out of order, it's not. But I know it's not the Hillary Swank one obviously. Okay, all right, yeah, so it's either three or four.
Well, I haven't seen the one you're talking about either. I don't remember anybody turning off any lights anywhere.
Yeah, it's truly bad in a great way.
Okay, So just back to Just like in the Muslim world, time keeping pieces in Europe were initially to keep people on track for daily prayers. Apparently, monks and monasteries prayed seven times a day, but there were also meals. There was also beer brewing time, and so these early clocks, using the virgin folio mechanism and weights, they helped keep the monks on track. Yeah, monks are associated with churches, so very soon after that churches started keeping clocks as well.
And fun fact, one of the reasons that churches often have very very tall steeples, often with bells on top, is because used to be parts of the clock. To run a clock so big that it can ring that bell, you need to have very heavy weights there coming and descending from a very high place.
Yeah, for sure, nice little factoid there.
I love that one.
And the oldest surviving mechanical clock is in a church. It was built for this Salisbury Cathedral that was in thirteen eighty six. But these clocks didn't have a face yet. It was still you know, like ringing a bell kind of thing to know what time it was. And in fact, the word clock comes from the French word is it close?
I guess like that glass thing dome you put over stuff.
Yeah, which is a bell. But you know, it wasn't too long after that that they said, hey, if we can have a clock turning gears, how hard would it be to actually put a sun dial kind of like thing on the front of it and turn the gears of a hand so people could actually see what time it was. Yeah, And they went, not that hard, we can do that.
They're like, are you talking about a moving gnomon? And the monk said, that's exactly what I'm talking about that's right. So there's this really interesting take on all that, the fact that the clocks started tracking time in monasteries and then churches in the cities that were built around churches would all hear the bell, so people knew what time it was all of a sudden. It wasn't like the sky's purple, so I better milk the cows. It was like, oh,
it's one in the afternoon, so I better milk the cows. Right, because apparently the sky would turn purple at one in the afternoon in medieval Europe. And there's a philosopher named
¶ Minutes, Springs, and Precision Challenges
Lewis Mumford I think he was working in the nineteen thirties, and he says that that is the birth of the modern era, not steam power that came hundreds of years later. Right, removing people from the rhythms, the natural rhythms of the day and imposing time on them all of a sudden, you could be like be at my blacksmith shop at three or else you're fired. You know, that would a draft exactly. I think that's a really good case that he makes.
Yeah, no, totally. I mean it was a real game changer, and that's when everyone got a little bit more uptight, I imagine.
I imagine as well.
You know, and we still didn't have minutes at this point, like those clocks that we were talking about, you know, grinding those gears around, you could still have a you know, a decent hour. As far as accuracy goes. The word minute actually to mean what we meant, it didn't even come around until the late fourteenth century. So minutes are a relatively modern thing if you consider fourteenth century modern.
Right, and thanks for letting me take that, Lewis mum for little tidbit.
Well, yeah, did you like that one?
I love it. It's almost as good as the the different smells of incense.
Yeah, well, you know, we like to scratch each other's back.
Another joke skipped. So you can take weights and their kinetic energy, and really now you can do You can take anything that has kinetic energy and use it to control its release, and you can use that to do
¶ Pendulum Clocks: A Leap in Accuracy
things like drive gears and things like that, and you can use those gears to keep time with Well, a coiled spring has a lot of kinetic energy. And yeah, replacing the weights in clocks with coiled springs meant they became portable because of course humans love to make things portable.
Yeah, but they were still pretty inexact because friction is a thing, So depending on how well it's made, how well it was lubricated, if it was hot, if it was humid, that that would make just change the way clocks work. So they were still pretty inexact at this point. So sundials were still kind of preferred. Water clocks were still preferred for a long time, and actually more precise.
If you really want to jump forward in precision, you can look no further than Galileo Galilee and the turn of the seventeenth century, and he was the one that kind of came up with this idea of a pendulum when he started measuring the movement of lamps swinging on a cord using his own pulse beat as a reference. Pretty cool.
Yeah, So he found like you can use a pendulum to keep time. The reason why, as a pendulum swing is divided in exactly and half time wise, right, So that's what's called a harmonious oscillator. Each swing to the left or the right is the exact same amount of time, and even more than that, when a pendulum loses energy, that doesn't change the arcs just get a little shorter, but they're still equal to one another, right. So Galileo figured out that you could use that information to build
a clock. He developed the clock. He never built it because he kept being called a way by the Indigo girls to help them get through life, so he was unable to build it. His son started to build it, but as Galileo always said, that boy never finished anything
that he started, so he didn't complete it. And finally, in sixteen fifty six, the Dutch mathematician Christian Hugens, the son Galileo always wanted, he ended up creating that clock, the first pendulum clock that Galileo had kind of come up with.
Yeah, that was in sixteen fifty six. And almost right after that there was an English scientist named Robert Hook with an e of the end, said you know what, I could make that thing better, and he replaced the verge with you know that we mentioned earlier, with a something called an anchor escapement, which was just a new mechanism to regulate the swing I guess, but that allowed the arc of the pendulum to be reduced from about one hundred I'm sorry, one hundred degree swing to four
to six degrees, which again meant you could pack it in a packageable size.
Yeah. And also they found that less of a swing, they found that the less wide the arc, the more accurate the timekeeping was. Anchor escapements are almost impossible to explain unless you see it actually happening, and they're like, oh, okay, that totally makes sense. But I say, go look up a video of how anchor escapements work, because it's pretty amazing. And so because you have slower moving pendulums, they require
less power, which means you need less weight. And eventually there's a guy named William Clement who put all of this stuff together and in sixteen eighty came up with what we now call grandfather clocks. And because of everything that kind of developed from Galileo on, Clement was able to add a minute hand and now all of a sudden you knew what minute it was of the hour thanks to William Clement.
That's right, And of course you're referring to the long case clock. It didn't get the name grandfather clock until eighteen twenty I'm sorry, eighteen seventy six. And that's actually
¶ Modern Timekeeping: Quartz to Atomic
from a song called My Grandfather's Clock. That's where it's about I mean, it's kind of a sad song about a clock that this this guy had who or his grandfather had, and it quit working when he died, and it was a really popular song. So long case clocks became my grandfather's clock, and the singer and I think writer was a guy named Henry Clay, not Henry Clay people, but Henry Clay work.
You know, that's a redux of our first short stuff.
I thought we had talked about that, right, that was the very first, the very first one.
Huh yeah, grandfather clocks man, so pendulum clocks. Everyone said, this is great. I love these long case slash grandfather clocks. But finally, in the twenties people had figured out, I guess centuries before, in the nineteenth century, a century before that you could keep tying with a crystal. They produced reliable oscillations that you could track for time, and people figured out how to use that and watches for that. I would say, go listen to our atomic clock episode.
Yeah, that was a good one.
Out From crystal quartz came atomic clocks, and from atomic clocks came things like GPS. It's how your iPhone or you know, Google phone keeps track of the time knows exactly what time it is thanks to an atomic clock. So we went from sun to water to pendulums to
¶ Watches: From Fashion to Military Gear
crystals to atoms.
That's right. And by the way, I bet I made that same dumb Henry Clay joke and that short stuff didn't.
I I'll have to go back and listen. But anytime you get a chance to mention Henry Clay People, you do, and I support it fully.
Of course, for those of you who don't know, Henry Clay People was a great band and friends of the show whom are a good Joey and Andy Ciarra, the brothers, musical brothers, screenwriting brothers, and they did the theme song to the Stuff You Should Know TV show.
That's right. It was a great theme, very catchy, and.
They're still a great friends. I see Joey all the time because he lives in New York now and Andy's still in LA.
That's awesome. Shout out.
That's right. So we're back or not, we're back. We're all of a sudden headed toward Watches. Everyone mm hm, and I mean this again, could be an entire episode on Watches. So we're not going to get to in the weeds, but those spring based clocks. Of course, that spring was kind of the key in the fifteenth century, eventually involved to wearable clocks like flava flave, and then then eventually we got to watch us. By the sixteenth century,
of course, we were talking about pocket watches. Initially kind of thing you hang from your vest or your belt or something, and it was a real fashion statement at the time. But as that technology progressed, they got smaller and smaller, maybe not more accurate, but just smaller enough to where you could finally put one on your wrist if you were the Countess of Hungary in eighteen sixty.
Eight, yeah, or one of Emperor Wilhelm the Second German naval officers in eighteen eighty, because before that watches were women's jewelry, that's what they were considered. Wilhelm the Second said nine, now it's going to be a military gear. Yeah.
And from World War One, which came a little later, the American and other Allied troops who came back home were like, you should see these hand clocks these guys have, and those became very quickly as starting around the twenties fashionable in the United States, and I think great Britain and in the twenties because they became fashion all of a sudden, there was a lot of attention on hand clocks and they became a lot of innovations just kind
of started to build very quickly starting in the twenties.
Yeah, and you know a lot of this stuff that you a lot of features that you have on a watch if you're watch person, comes from military usage, like the of course I can't remember any of this because it's off the dome and I'm a forgetful person. But you know the watches that have the little buttons on each side of the winder and you can like click it to start something and then click it to stop it.
Yeah, stop watch, No, stop.
Watch just like on a regular wristwatch. There's a name for it. I mean I have one of them. I just can't think of it right now.
But it's for a stopwatch function though, right.
Well yeah, essentially, but as it pertains to the regular time. But that was essentially, I think initially to keep track of like when you would launch a not a missile, like the kind of bomb you drop in a tube and it shoots somewhere torpedo. Sure, No, Like you know when you drop it in a tube and it shoots up in the air. Yeah, drop a shell into a tube and then like when it would make the explosion, you would keep track of, like you would time that out so you would know, like how far it's going
in calculat Oh smart, I think that's the deal. I hope I'm not wrong. Someone will correct me.
Well, what about water resistance?
Yeah, I mean if you want to dive or just frolic, then you're going to need a waterproof watch. And that came along with the Rolex the Oyster, specifically in nineteen twenty six, and then in the nineteen fifties that's when stop watch functions, although that was around during the war, So I'm not sure the difference between what I was talking about in an actual stopwatch and my favorite feature, which is luminescence. As you know, I kind of became
a bit of a watch guy. And I don't have a ton of them, but got like seven watches and one of them is a not for real watch people they have like dozens and hundreds, but I have one called a loom Tech and that is the most luminescent that you can get, I think, And that thing is so bright and cool. I just love it.
Does it leave like floaters on your vision after you look at it?
No, But if it's like fully charging go into a dark closet or something, it's like, it's super bright green and it's awesome. I love it.
So you can really time out your spin the bottle?
Oh you know it, because I don't want to be in that closet for me any longer than I have to be.
I was raised baptism, making awkward conversation, Yeah, totally. So if you are like I want to hear more about watches ts, We're pretty much at the end of the episode, but I would recommend going and listening to our watch episode because we talked a lot about the transition from
¶ Astrology's Linguistic Legacy and Mail
mechanical watches to digital watches in that episode. If I remember correctly, it's pretty interesting.
Yeah, for sure. Chronographs that's what I'm talking about with the watches, by the way.
But what does it do.
It's like a sub dial for the seconds and minutes and hours I think, so that the top button will be a start stop and the bottom is a reset. So it did it function is like a stopwatch. But I think they got their start with timing out shells and when they exploded, if I'm not mistaken, not torpedoes, yeah, I think, but again off the dome. So if I'm wrong, all apologies you're saying.
Chronog chronograph reminded me of one little tidbit I forgot to mention. Remember how we talked about planetary hours and the Romans were like, this is when you worship you know, Mars or whatever. Yeah, that is where the word horoscope came from. Horoscope means our marker.
Pretty nay huh, yeah, I like that.
Okay, nifty, I like it too, And since Chuck said he likes it, that obviously means it's time for listener mail.
That's right, And we read this from Bill I guess you would pronounce this rooshline because he asked a question about the appropriateness of our live show. And we've gotten a few emails, so we thought we kind of get the word out. Hey, guys, been listening for for ten years since commuting from Erie to Pittsburgh for a new job, you feel countless hours of boredom with education and smiles.
As my family and I now listen to your show almost weekly, and my now almost eleven year old son has grown up listening to you guys since shortly after he was born.
Nice.
So we're coming to your show in Akron, Ohio, and we're pretty ecstatic about that. We can't wait to come. But I was hoping to respond and let me know what the content is appropriate for our eleven year old to come. We're loose with what he's allowed to listen to, and don't try and shield him too much from the world. Everything you put out is educational. For instance, the Operation
Mincemeat episode is one of our favorites. But there's anything particularly mature, like murder stuff or like the Lizzie Bordon episode, we should probably be responsible parents and Bill and others. We're here to say that we're not going to reveal the topic, but this one is very much kid appropriate. The only thing you might hear we like to delight people with a few odd curse words here and there because we don't do it on this show, but it's still what do you call it, PGPG PG eleven Maybe.
Yeah, okay these days yeah, I would even say, depending on the kid, maybe PG eight. We get some fairly young kids at our shows, and I've never seen a parent leave with the child. They usually just leap behind.
I think in Scotland didn't that when family leave.
Yeah, I still don't understand that. We didn't say anything even remotely offensive. Yeah, and I think they just didn't like the sounds of our voices or something like that. I don't maybe so, but I don't think it was anything we said.
Okay, good.
Well.
Content wise though, this one is super on the up and up and kid appropriate. Nothing's scary at all, super pop, cultury, historical, kind of interesting, but just maybe a curse word or two.
Yeah, maybe a blue joke here there, but hopefully over any kid's head.
Yeah, that's what we like to do. It's confused children so their parents get explain on the way.
How exactly right. That's great, Chuck, that was a good idea. If you're like, wait, you guys are going on tour, we absolutely are. I would direct you to stuff youshould know dot com and click on the on tour button and it will show you all the places we're going to be and if you click on those, it will take you to go buy tickets so you can come see us. This is the first time in years and years, I guess, since we've been on the road so we're
kind of excited about coming back. Maybe a little rusty, yeah, but that also usually means that those first couple shows get some high flying high jinks.
Yeah, I get ready Denver the Mile High City. How appropriate's right?
And if you want to get in touch with us, like Bill right, yeh Bill did? Thanks for that email Bill and we'll see you in Akron. You can email us at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.